Give Less This Christmas – to Social Media and the Internet
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
By Michael Gold
This Christmas let’s give less.
That’s the advice of Pastor Kevin O’Hara, of Pleasantville’s Emmanuel Lutheran Church.
O’Hara says we should give less of ourselves to social media and the internet and give more of ourselves to our family and community.
“We’re mostly on the Internet. Technology tells me I don’t have to connect with others. It’s something about social media, you can disengage from other people,” O’Hara said. “One of the things about our addiction (to the internet) is that you don’t have to get vulnerable. It’s a great dopamine buzz. People want the artificial because they can control it.”
“We see this with families. A mother texted her child to come to dinner (instead of speaking to him). “People are looking at their phones during services. People (in his church) post things on Facebook, a health concern, but they don’t tell me face to face. Technology – that’s not real, that makes us feel lonely. We’re making our own world (without others). Disinformation is shattering relationships.”
O’Hara explained the Christmas story in starkly human terms – about a family that’s been marginalized and hunted by the reigning authorities.
“In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is born in the middle of the night,” the pastor explained. “Only the shepherds know what’s going on. The wise men follow this star and tell King Herod about the birth of a boy, to bring homage to a king for the Jewish people. Herod decrees that children under two years of age should be killed. Joseph and his family flee to Egypt.”
“The true Christmas story embraces those who aren’t at peace, those facing political persecution. It’s a story of those who are most vulnerable.”
What does he recommend we do for Christmas?
“Let’s spend time face to face, even somebody you don’t agree with,” O’Hara told me in his study at the Manville Road church. “Find out their hopes and fears. What is their value that they put on life? Having them open our eyes, that our world is not the only world out there” provides for us a foundation for empathy for others, he said.
“I have to listen to you – we will be together.”
O’Hara said that he saw a cousin over Thanksgiving, “who’s trying to make sense of the world. I don’t think she’s ever going to see things my way. But we can still show each other love, despite our disagreements. I can still hold that person in my heart.
“Let’s show it by presence, not presents,” he said, meaning that we can all give more of ourselves, rather than just offering a product to someone we love.
“Are gifts really the greatest thing we are celebrating?” O’Hara asked. “When you’re a kid, it’s all about the gifts and what Santa Claus could do, as opposed to my family.”
Instead, he said, “Focus on relationships and neighbors. Appreciate the companionship. My suggestion is to become a pen pal with somebody in prison or a different ethnicity than you, or your neighbor.”
He alluded to the incoming administration. In meetings with other Lutheran pastors in Westchester, O’Hara is hearing of the worry of immigrants being deported.
“There’s anti-immigrant rhetoric,” he said. “Immigrants are feeling nervous, that their status will be revoked. There’s the worry that Mom or Dad will be taken away when they come home from school. I’m sure we’re going to hear more stories of communities falling apart. People could be put into camps; that’s not human.
“I lived on Long Island during the first Trump administration. We saw people detained, people taken by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and deported. There was no humanity to it, the round-up.”
O’Hara leads a weekly online class, called “Growing in Faith,” with about 10 to 15 people, from ages 18 to 90, diverse in their race, economic status, age and sexual orientation, from all over the country, as part of the Lutheran Church’s national outreach efforts to its members.
“There’s a lot of worry and fear out there,” O’Hara said. “Some talked about how they lived in the 1960s, when they had to drink at a different water fountain because they’re Black.”
The discrimination and racism are still out there, O’Hara said. He spoke of another member of the group, a Jamaican immigrant who worked hard to get her nursing degree, and now works in a city hospital. She told a story about a white woman who said to her recently that she couldn’t possibly be a nurse, that at most she could only be a janitor or caretaker.
To O’Hara, the meaning of Christmas is “to defend those who are most needy and to walk with them.”
He encourages all of us “get off your phone, find joy in a moment, one hour of the day being in the community with others.”
Michael Gold has had articles published in the New York Daily News, the Albany Times Union and other newspapers, and The Hardy Society Journal, a British literary publication.
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